Op-Ed: Facing Unpleasant Facts in the Middle East

The time has come to sit back, take a deep breath and re-evaluate the entire Middle East situation. Such careful inspection and rethinking can only lead to one simple conclusion: the Middle East conflict cannot end until the Occupation ends.

The time has come to sit back, take a deep breath and re-evaluate the entire Middle East situation. Such careful inspection and rethinking can only lead to one simple conclusion: the Middle East conflict cannot end until the Occupation ends.

Of course, the Occupation of which I speak is the illegal occupation of Israeli lands by the PLO. The key to peace in the Middle East is the liberation of these occupied territories from their occupying power. End the Occupation now! The Occupation corrupts!

Now, had you been listening to the Western media in recent years, you might be unaware of the fact that the only "occupied territories" in the West Bank and Gaza these days are those occupied by the PLO. True, each and every atrocity by the PLO and its front groups is greeted in the Jew-bashing media with diatribes about how it is all because Israel refuses to give up its occupation of Palestinian lands. The BBC ends every single report on bombings by reminding everyone of how all the violence is directly caused by Sharon having strolled on the Temple Mount two years back; the BBC, CNN and Economist still routinely justify the shooting into the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem by describing it as an illegal settlement on Palestinian lands.

Yet Israel long ago gave up its "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza, if that is what is meant by the misnomer "Palestinian Lands". The result was to turn those areas into huge bomb factories and terrorist bases, precisely in the manner predicted by all of us anti-Oslo dissidents many years ago.

One problem of the Middle East conflict is the basing of so much policy and debate on futurology. When Shimon Peres and his pack of lemmings proposed turning the "occupied territories" over to the PLO to create a Palestinian state, those of us of the non-insane persuasion insisted this would merely result in those territories being used as launch bases for attacks on Israel, including terrorist, mortar and rocket shelling. The Jewish Left guffawed and insisted: "Prove It!". We then recounted the PLO track record. "Nope," they bellowed, "That ain't no scientific proof at all. No one knows for sure how the PLO would behave if granted the territories. Gotta give it a chance to see. We are sure they will act peacefully."

Of course, the scientific proof such people were demanding could only be provided by first turning the territories over to the PLO and then seeing how it behaves. Until doing so, no one had any "proof". It was all futurology. The entire debate in Israel in the early 1990s was over what would happen in the future, and by definition no one can "prove" what will happen in the future until it happens.

Well, now thanks to Shimon Peres and the Jewish Left, we have the proof.

Meanwhile, it should be patently obvious to all with eyes in their heads that sooner or later Israel will have to retake and re-occupy the entire set of PLO-occupied territories. No, it will not do so because these are sacred Jewish lands and no it will not do so because of any particular desire to rule Palestinians. It will do so because as long as a single acre of land is under PLO rule, it will be used for nothing other than as a base to murder Jews. The only way to end the atrocities by the PLO is to seize and rule the West Bank and Gaza. All of it. Yes, including Gaza City and Jericho.

In other words, there is one, and only one, viable way to create stability and peace in the Middle East. That is the R&D plan - that is, Re-Occupation and Denazification. Israel must conquer militarily all of the West Bank and Gaza, impose martial law there, and then conduct a policy over decades of Denazification, partially based on the policies imposed on Germany and Japan by the Allies after World War II, partially original.

I have insisted from the start that the problem in Israel is not the Arabs, but rather the Jewish Leftists. All of the violence is caused by Jewish Leftists. The West Bank and Gaza are large bomb factories because of Jewish Leftists. Israel has become the Valley of the Shadow of Death thanks to Jewish Leftists. Have Jewish Leftists learned anything? Of course not. Leftists never learn anything.

This week they are out in force, showing their solidarity with Azmi Bashara and Ahmed Tibi, the heads of two Arab fascist lists that have been banned as terrorists from running for the parliament. Half of Haaretz is devoted to defending their "right" to sit in the parliament. Strange that Haaretz is never upset that there are no Arab countries in which Arabs who hate Israel can run in free elections for the parliaments.
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Steven Plaut teaches at the University of Haifa and is author of The Scout (available from Gefen Publishing House: http://161.58.167.199/shop/indi_scout.htm).